Bio & Contact

home [at] frankswain [dot] com
+44 787 656 3082

Frank Swain writes and talks about science.

He is Communities Editor at New Scientist, and has written for the Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Wired, New Scientist, BBC Focus, BBC Future, Mosaic, Slate, Microbiologist, Stylist, Salon, IET, Rhizome, and Plastic Rhino among others. He is the creator of Futures Exchange on Medium and SciencePunk at National Geographic’s ScienceBlogs portal.

In 2014 he collaborated with sound artist Daniel Jones on Phantom Terrains, an augmented reality art project in which the pair hacked Frank’s hearing aids so that he could hear wi-fi signals.

His broadcast work includes developing and presenting programs for BBC Radio 4 and Bravo, as well as advising for other networks. He’s appeared on BBC Radios 5Live, 4, Oxford and Three Counties; and Newstalk.ie as well as More4 News, to discuss science topics.

Frank has hosted science events at the Wellcome Trust, the London Barbican, Amsterdam’s Sonic Acts arts festival, Brighton’s Improving Reality, the BA Festival of Science, the Secret Garden Party and Shambala festivals, and spoken at schools and universities across the country including Cambridge, Imperial College London, and the Royal College of Art.

Previously, he worked at the Royal Statistical Society, heading a government-funded project to develop science workshops for journalists. Over two years, it provided basic science and statistical training to over 600 journalists, press offices and journalism students. Before that, he was employed at Sense About Science, co-editing There Goes the Science Bit…, a report by the Voice of Young Science group investigating dodgy science claims in advertising, and working with BBC’s Newsnight to reveal the pseudoscience behind the Brain Gym programme.

His first book, How to Make a Zombie, was published in June 2013 by OneWorld Publications. Here he is talking about zombies: